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2) The liberal talk shows I’ve listened to are not really all that entertaining. The jokes tend to be mean-spirited personal attacks and are rarely as clever as what I have heard on Rush Limbaugh’s program. I think if the left wants to have a successful talk radio platform, they should be asking people like Jon Stewart for ideas and quit trying to silence the opposition.

Marty Grant
New York City

Your theories about the talk radio audience are intriguing. The most rewarding aspect of talk radio for me is the callers, whose voices are heard nowhere else in the culture — the feisty, super-organized home-schooling moms, the gruffly stoical transcontinental truckers, and the fiercely independent and self-reliant small-business owners, outraged by Washington’s tilt toward bailing out corrupt, top-heavy corporations.

However, the popularity of conservative radio shows is a round-the-clock phenomenon. There are flamboyant evening hosts as well as night replays of the major daytime shows, extending well past midnight to dawn. Clearly, conservative hosts have an instinctive rapport with AM radio, which I have been arguing for years is a populist medium (an idea that finally seems to have taken wing in its invocation by other commentators).

Salon reader Cecil W. Powell writes: “The failure of talkers on liberal radio is in large part due to an absolute inability to poke fun at themselves.” How true! Liberal hosts like to snap and snip and chortle snidely, but they are weighed down by a complacent superiority complex, a paralyzing sanctimony. They mistake irony for wit. The conservative hosts love to rant and stomp and bring down the house. They’re doing breakneck vaudeville while liberal hosts are primly stirring their non-caffeine green tea.

Why do you and others in the press keep misattributing this “magic Negro” comment to Rush Limbaugh? My understanding from listening to his radio program is that the phrase you are referring to from Rush’s parody song was first brought to light in an article by David Ehrenstein in the Los Angeles Times. Why didn’t you mention this in your column? Rush merely ran with it in one of his many parodies, which he is notably famous for. Often he takes comments made in the press or by politicians and parodies them — most often to expose their hypocrisy.

The press has tied Rush to “magic Negro” as if he were the originator or instigator. Thus Rush is unfairly and routinely condemned for it.

L. Bryan
Columbus, Ga.

“Barack the Magic Negro” was a song parody by a longtime contributor to the Rush Limbaugh Show, Paul Shanklin, whom I consider to be one of the most brilliant satirists of our time. Shanklin has an analytic erudition about popular music, a genius for mimicry, and an astounding gift for creative rapid-response to hard news. The widespread and vitriolic misjudgments about what goes on during Rush’s show could and should have been dispelled a decade ago had Shanklin’s fiendishly clever parodies been released into general circulation. Yes, they can be purchased in CD collections, and they are also available online to subscribers to the Limbaugh Web site, but that draconian limitation has unfairly confined Shanklin’s work to conservative partisans. My all-time favorite in the Shanklin oeuvre is “I Can’t Recall,” a parody of “Try to Remember” (from “The Fantasticks”) with an air-headed Hillary on the witness stand claiming that she just can’t remember a single darn thing about that silly old Whitewater deal because her mind has turned to Jell-O … Jello-O … Jello-O (fading off in echoes).

When I first heard “Barack the Magic Negro” shortly after the March 2007 publication of the Ehrenstein article (which was partly inspired by a term used by director Spike Lee), I found it very daring and funny. It was timely and had the shock of the new — exactly like Lenny Bruce’s violation of conventional proprieties. But Rush kept playing it and playing it well beyond its shelf date, and after a while it felt gratuitous and dismayingly oblivious to racial realities and sensitivities in the U.S. Although I’m a longtime fan of Rush’s show, I started turning the radio off when this skit came on.

Here’s the main point: The vocal in “Barack the Magic Negro” mimics grandstanding black activist Al Sharpton, while the namby-pamby melody is borrowed from “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a children’s song that when originally performed by folkies Peter, Paul and Mary was widely assumed to be an allegory for marijuana smoking. So the Shanklin parody went well beyond the Ehrenstein article in what was being implied about Obama as well as the turf wars of African-American politics. There are so many other wonderful parodies in the Shanklin collection that more richly deserve repeated airplay. And for heaven’s sake, they all belong on YouTube. Unlock the vaults!

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